Intro

In this project assignment, our team had the chance to work on the CHI 2024 Student Design Competition prompt. Our team has come a long way until settling on the issue of mindless eating. We have spent much time on problem framing and on narrowing down our target user group. We have started with mental wellbeing and mood shifts, then going to the caregiver side of suicidal patients, then seasonal depression. Though, we have resonated deeply with these issues, and we may work on them in the future, we had to find a problem space which was more appropriate to the given timeframe and resources. That problem space and how we have come to our proposed solution is explained below.

The context

Let me introduce you first to the situation of our user, Sid.

The problem

Framing the problem has touched several problems that are close to each other, but still different. They vary based on severity. Due to our constraints, we could not work on the states where the issue is already considered as an eating disorder, so we excluded "Binge Eating" and "Storm/Fog Eating". This is why we stayed on the verge, where the act is erratic, not recurring, called Mindeless Eating.

“Snacking at odd hours helps with work, especially gets me in the flow, but its the regret that follows when you have consumed too much”

- Interviewee, Office employee

Mindful eating is a holistic practice of eating with the intention of caring for oneself by noticing and enjoying the food, recognizing its effect on the body, and knowing when to stop. [1]

Mindless eating has been observed to stem from different reasons (stress, boredom etc) other than hunger. People may forget how much they have already eaten, and may end up overeating. This mindless eating behavior over time may manifest into bigger problems such as obesity and heart diseases [1].

Target audience

Whom are we solving for?
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User group that has transitioned from university to professional set up (initial years of full-time job) and working from office.

Regular office going employees

Work from home employees

User research

As primary research, we have conducted 10 one-on-one interviews. The inerviews (and the secondary research) showed that snacking can enhance productivity, and what seemed to be most important from the synthesized insights, is that it happens when the user is in a state of (mindless) flow.

Insights from the interviews
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Activity - Mindless Eating in the Office
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Environment - Office
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Snacking in the Flow of Work & thoughts
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Triggers - Stress, Habit & Boredom
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After snacking consciousness - Guilt
Some give in but would be conscious if interrupted

Problem statement

The transition from student life to young professionals contributes to an imbalance in the schedule, eating habits and lifestyle of the person. A direct consequence and partial solution to many of this has been identified to be mindless eating. This sudden change in lifestyle has an impact on the health and well-being thus requires an intervention.

Design scope

Designing to help young professional (early career) indulging in mindless eating while working from office by creating a product that serves as an intervention by introducing subtle nudges.

Ideation & Prototyping

We have mapped the user work-journey to identify possible entry points and times to insert our product into the work-life of user. We have also investigated the most common devices used by office workers to see if they could provide a touchpoint towards our solution. Through this process we decided upon creating a standalone product, which can be integrated into an ecosystem in the future.

After that, we utilized the power of iterative sketching to generate ideas, from what we can filter out the most promising. We created 250 sketches, which have uncovered possible issues, next to the desired fetures. They include for eg. the difficulty in maintaining user engagement with digital companion over extended periods, or potential intrusiveness in certain settings.

Keeping them in mind, we went forward with our design process. The following sections show and explain the nudge types we chose, and the user scenarios we drafted.

Breaking the flow

How do we create a nudge?

Visual nudge

With movement

Auditory nudge

With expressions

Subtle nudges

We mapped our nudges to the model of Hansen and Jespersen, from what we can see that the majority only inlfuences the user behaviour, which is desireable. The usage of emotional expressions can be risky, especially if we consider the probable attachment between the user and companion. We handled that extra carefully. We decided that the usability tests should reflect on its perception and validity. It is clear that the product does not manipulate choice, the user is aware what is happening, and can freely choose how to interact, when user action is asked from the companion.

Four categories of nudges, adapted from Hansen and Jespersen

Nudge: Any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any option or significantly changing their economic incentive [5]

peripheral vision

Periheral vision comes into play related to the placement of companion. The placement can reduce intrusiveness, and it can yield great results too in the meanwhile.

Peripheral perception can be used to attract attention through different techniques including but not limited to motion activity, visual cues [3].

Considering the phenomenon of change blindness where people fail to notice changes in their environment that are occurring slowly right in front of their eyes, we decided to exploit the peripheral vision with dynamic visual cues in the form of light signals, vibrations, movement [4].

user scenario 1

Gesture of petting

Sid had opened a packet of chips

The digital companion swells up and then slowly pops the top portion

The user then uses his hand to put the top down to end the red subtle blinking

user scenario 2

Breaking the flow with movement

Sid has been munching for a couple of minutes endlessly

The companion notices and moves around the work-desk

The user’s flow in mindless eating slowly breaks and then the companion goes back to its normal position

user scenario 3

The ecosystem

Sid uses his ID card to swipe on the vending machine to buy some munchies

He is back at his desk and starts working

The companion gives a subtle notification in textual format

our companion

The product uses video and acoustic sensors to identify eating states, and to decide if intervention is needed. Different kind of fabrics can be used to create a more engaging interaction between the two parties. As mentioned before, it can be integrated into a wider ecosystem, and the battery power provides convenience of movement for the user.

Digital Companion: Research provides proof of technological feasibility of a companion to effectively track and identify the user’s eating behavior by computer vision, sound recognition, and inertial tracking [6].

usability testing

We conducted usability tests based on the Wizard of Oz method.

Task: Have the users go about working on their assignment (with no urgent submission deadlines so as to not hinder their process as such) with a bag of chips on the desk. Observe for 10-15 mins and introduce the nudge in wizard of oz style as soon as they reach out for the bag of chips.

Post testing questions:

What was your first impression of the digital companion? Did features like vibration, movement, lighting, and sound make any difference?
What were your feelings when you received the first few nudges from the digital companion? Did you notice them? Did the nudge effectively steal your attention?
On a scale from 1–10, rate your comfort and feelings of intrusiveness, with comfort being 10, and intrusiveness being 1.
How clearly did you understand the purpose of the digital companion?
What is your feedback that could enhance your experience with the digital companion?

feedback

“Perhaps, add a more personified look to the companion. Maybe something furry.”

- Tester, Graduate student

Extra care must be taken with respect to user emotional states.
The nudge successfully made the user aware of the snacking.
It may irritate the user with usage over time.
May not be helpful when the user is not on the desk and snacking elsewhere.
May be invasive for some users.

References

[1] Rohit Ashok KHOT*, Deepti Aggarwal, and Nandini Pasumarthy. 2022. Understanding Screen-based Dining Practices through the Lens of Mindful Eating. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), April 29–May 05, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19 pages.

[2] Allen AP, Smith AP. Chewing gum: cognitive performance, mood, well-being, and associated physiology. Biomed Res Int. 2015;2015:654806. doi: 10.1155/2015/654806. Epub 2015 May 17. PMID: 26075253; PMCID: PMC4449949. 

[3] Lindsay Reynolds, Jeremy Birnholtz, Eli Luxenberg, Carl Gutwin, and Maryam Mustafa. 2010. Comparing awareness and distraction between desktop and peripheral-vision displays. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3571–3576. 
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[4] David B. Ramsay and Joseph A. Paradiso. 2022. Peripheral Light Cues as a Naturalistic Measure of Focus. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX ’22), June 22–24, 2022, Aveiro, JB, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. 

[5] Ana Caraban, Evangelos Karapanos, Daniel Gonçalves, and Pedro Campos. 2019. 23 Ways to Nudge: A Review of Technology-Mediated Nudging in Human-Computer Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 503, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300733  

[6] Sibo Pan, Xipei Ren, Steven Vos, and Aarnout Brombacher. 2021. Digital Tools to Promote Healthy Eating for Working-Age Individuals: A Scoping Review. In The Ninth International Symposium of Chinese CHI (Chinese CHI 2021), October 16, 17, 2021, Online, Hong Kong. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages.